The Observable Abysmal Incompetence of Trump’s First 100 Days

[yt_dropcap type=”square” font=”” size=”14″ color=”#000″ background=”#fff” ] D [/yt_dropcap]onald Trump is very proud of the fact that, as a business man, he knows how to negotiate and make deals. But the crucial logical question is this: how well does he know what he is negotiating?

Were we to attempt to answer that question judging by the first 100 days in office, we’d soon discover an abundance of sheer incompetence. Evan business leaders are beginning to acknowledge as much. Trump himself has declared recently that he didn’t think the job would be so hard. That’s a narcissist’s mode of acknowledging ignorance and incompetence, not to speak of corruption.

E.g., the administration has scrambled to come up with the outline of a tax plan that’s more or less the same as the one that has been on Trump’s website for months now: cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 to 15 percent, slashing individual tax rates across the board, and expanding the standard deduction, big-league. This attempt to create the illusion of progress is a longtime Trump tactic.

Trump’s “The Art of the Deal” brags about how he supposedly tricked Holiday Inn into going into business with him on a casino by having construction crews dig holes and fill them up, making it look as if he was already building it when he wasn’t. But assuming that worked then – maybe they thought it was a good deal except for the fact that Trump’s workers seemed so inept? – it can’t now.

That’s because you can’t threaten to go it alone in government, as you can in business. Trump can work on his tax plan as much as he likes, but he still can’t pass it without Congress. And, whether or not he has noticed, they have their own ideas, which they’re not going to give up just because he made a big to-do about having some of his own. That has been pretty clear when it comes to health care, where Trump knows so little about his own plan that he doesn’t realize he has been trying to get Republicans who think it’s too stingy to agree with Republicans who think it isn’t stingy enough.

This also applies to taxation. The big question there is whether Republicans want to try to permanently reduce tax rates a little or temporarily reduce them a lot. That’s due to the rules for what’s known as budget reconciliation. Republicans can pass a bill with 51 votes rather than the 60 it takes to break a filibuster – a bar they can’t clear – if, and only if, their bill doesn’t add to the deficit after a decade. Trump, though, has proposed a corporate tax cut that’s too big to pay for and too long-lasting to work with the reconciliation rules. Indeed, the scorekeepers at the Joint Committee on Taxation say that even a three-year corporate tax cut would cost money outside the 10-year budget window. Trump, in other words, has started with a nonstarter. To put that into a twitter sentence: “Bad, bad, bad.”

Also, Trump has so far failed to fill the spots of undersecretaries and assistant secretaries, those who do the actual work of making policy. He seems to want to leave them empty. Again, using a twit: “simpler that way, and cheaper.” Even if he had, though, Trump still wouldn’t understand those policies well enough himself to be able to horse-trade their way through Congress. Which, of course, assumes that Trump does in fact know how to make deals. The evidence suggests otherwise.

In conclusion, there is a new normal in town and it is incompetence exacerbated by corruption together with the inability to perceive them. Far from having a “republic of virtue” the way the ancient Greek understood it, what we have presently is a “republic of incompetence and corruption” otherwise known as “the big swamp.” Only truth can save us now. If we have done away with it too, then the game called democracy is pretty much over and done with.

Professor Paparella has earned a Ph.D. in Italian Humanism, with a dissertation on the philosopher of history Giambattista Vico, from Yale University. He is a scholar interested in current relevant philosophical, political and cultural issues; the author of numerous essays and books on the EU cultural identity among which A New Europe in search of its Soul, and Europa: An Idea and a Journey. Presently he teaches philosophy and humanities at Barry University, Miami, Florida. He is a prolific writer and has written hundreds of essays for both traditional academic and on-line magazines among which Metanexus and Ovi. One of his current works in progress is a book dealing with the issue of cultural identity within the phenomenon of “the neo-immigrant” exhibited by an international global economy strong on positivism and utilitarianism and weak on humanism and ideals.